Interactive electronic services and the World Wide Web (i.e. the Web) provide access to an increasing supply of information and services. It is known to associate hyperlinks with selected items (e.g. words, pictures, footnotes, symbols, icons) printed on hard-copy documents to locally or remotely accessible servers. However, the items that can be selected for creating hyperlinks are limited to those already printed on the original physical document. If there is a need to create hyperlinks from items (e.g. comments or annotations) not printed on the original document, then they must be marked beforehand (with physical ink), thus degrading the integrity of the original document.